Creative workshops this summer

Posted by Benedikte Vanderweeën on 29/03/2012

A while ago, a good friend of mine, who’s a ceramist, Françoise Busin, proposed to do a workshop together this summer. She has organized several ceramist workshops before in the south of France, a place for ceramists. She asked if i could give a drawing workshop and a watercolor painting workshop. Because I love drawing and painting i agreed to help with the program and the lectures of the workshop. We also invited, my sister Sarah to give a workshop on sewing and making clothes and accessories, she has made her own clothing & accessories label Hummingbird and Bumblebee - that is now active as B is for Bird. So in the end, we decided to make it an allround creative workshop. The place where the workshop will be held is Russeignies, a tiny little village in the french part of Belgium, near from where i live.

A friend of mine Britt, and web designer known as Mixette, made a clear website about this workshop with all the details, visit it here: creatieve workshop

From where i start

A little background on the workshop i will be giving

From time to time, i jump on my bike and ride around my village, just to be outside for a while and to admire the landscape. As an art student, i made so many sketches of the landscape around here. Now, i make pictures and post a selection to Instagram, a fine online photography sharing service. I made a selection of my pictures on Tumblr.

What my workshop will be about

Drawing and painting

Because the environment is so pretty in Russeignies, it's located on the foot of the "Mont de l'Enclus", we'll be making photo walks. We'll make time to do some sketching and i'll explain the details to pay attention to so we can make paintings later on based on our pictures and sketches. It will not be a photography workshop, our pictures will be used as sketches, as visual reminders of color, light and form.

Sketches, drawings turn into watercolor painting

Watercolor

I've always liked watercolor-aquarel because of the quickness of the medium and the lightness of the paint. The initial drawing remains visible and the progress of the painting is done by using layer over layer. You start by building light layers and progress by giving accents to elements in the painting.

Making a digital version of the drawing and/or painting

Vectors

Once we have our drawings, our sketches and also made watercolor painting we can take the whole experience 1 step further, we can turn it into a digital landscape for use on a blog, on a website, for print. Most important thing here is to decide if you want your artwork to be scalable (very big) or just the format as you intended it in the first place, mostly A4 and A3 will be the case. In my example, i used Photoshop to import and make the artwork because that's the software most people can work with - or similar to Photoshop.But in fact, you can also use Illustrator to have a similar result.

In this little animation, i split the process in quick steps, it's a bit of a quick overview (the quality of this animation isn't excellent because of the animated GIF format):

What you will learn in the workshop

analyzing a landscape, the basics of perspective

make rough sketches and/or snapshots as research material

drawing of basics in landscapes: form

start a painting, building this painting with color layers

adding details to the painting

demo and workshop conversion from a painting or photo into Photoshop, how to build the landscape digital

Once finished, you can use your artwork in many formats, use it as a banner

My inspiration

Some links for inspiration

Some time ago, i felt inspire by watching a documentary about the landscape drawing and painting work of David Hockney - who has an expo now in The Royal Academy in London, A Bigger Picture.

I hope to see the expo of Matisse in Paris within a few weeks, Centre Pompidou

The first movie i saw by Peter Greenaway was i believe "The Draughtsman's Contract" (1982) in which an artist has to make a series of sketches of a castle, i always remembered the "Grid" tools he uses in the movie to draw landscapes. I found a picture to demonstrate (it's much like the build-in grids in the modern digital camera's)

Feel free to contact me if you have questions or remarks or visit the website if you want to be part of the creative team this summer: creatieve workshop